These two costs are yin/yang

Raising one will tend to lower the other. Lowering one will tend to raise the other.

One is not objectively more important than the other. What is important is that the two are in balance/harmony.

Tx fees are intrinsic costs (priced in sats and affected by demand for the finite blockspace)

Node hardware/bandwidth, etc. are extrinsic costs (usually not priced in BTC, affected by commodity PC/server prices, Moore's Law)

Its likely that if nothing changes, running a node will continue to get cheaper (in BTC terms) while fees continue to get more expensive.

It remains to be seen to what extent this trend is harmonic within the ecosystem.